You may have heard that National Public Radio (NPR) decided to stop posting to Twitter last week, after the Musk-owned social media company started labeling the NPR account, at first, “State affiliated media,” changed within 48 hours to “Government-funded.” The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) also made a similar announcement on April 17th 2023.
If you’re interested in re-adding either NPR or CBC’s news headlines to your news feed, I’ve just released bots which tweet out new NPR and CBC stories: @NPRbrief and @CBCbrief respectively.
It’s up and running, and simply watches NPR stories and tweets them out.
NPRbrief grabs news from the NPR’s website across all eight top-level categories: National, World, Science, Health, Climate, Business, Race, and Politics. It updates every 15 minutes, tweeting a maximum of 100 stories per day. It’s fully automated and is hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Why?
Though I’m personally rather critical of NPR’s recent swing leftward, I think it’s extremely important to follow news sources from multiple political lenses. It’s about our only shot right now at knowing what is true. You don’t have to believe the stories coming from any given news source, but it’s useful to see them, and not have them filtered from your life.
I wrote about this in Internet Consensus is not Truth.
As some ideological outlets decide to “depart” Twitter in protest, this trend only accelerates the filter-bubbling of our lives, and I think it’s useful to push back against that “taking our marbles and going elsewhere” move. There are many forces at work to wall people into silos. If other companies think they can just “take their content elsewhere,” that seems to go against a key goal of the Internet’s public square.
How
Just click the “Follow” buttons above. It’s free. Please consider sharing this with NPR and/or CBC-loving friends.
